inn-/’an(n-) Clauses: Stylistic and Syntactic Variation in Moroccan Digital Press

The written production in the Arab world is usually characterized by an extensive use of Standard Arabic. It is, however, possible to state that written practices reflect a significant variability, both historically and sociolinguistically, in the past and in the more recent developments of the digital revolution. The aim of this study is to show how the Arabic written practices of online newspapers are characterized by a great syntactic flexibility. In particular, this study analyzes to what extent internal linguistic processes and the influence of vernacular languages affect written practices in the Moroccan digital reality. The study has been carried out on a corpus of articles and readers’ comments of three online newspapers (Hespress, Goud and Alakhbar). The comparative analysis between two different thematic columns, sports and opinion articles, focused on the construction of ’in(n)/’an(n) clauses, reveals that at the morphological and syntactic level, a contrasting stylistic variation emerges from the syntactic choices of authors, both in formal practices (articles), and in informal practices (readers' comments). This analysis will make it possible to reflect on whether the emergence of mixed Arabic forms in written production tends to constitute new form(s) of conventionalized normalization.